The Romans were almost amphibious.  They bathed themselves as often as seven times per diem; and young people of style passed a portion of the day, and often a part of the night, in the warm baths.  Hence the importance which these establishments assumed in ancient times.  There were eight hundred and fifty-six public baths at Rome, in the reign of Augustus.  Three thousand bathers could assemble in the thermae of Caracalla, which had sixteen hundred seats of marble or of porphyry.  The thermae of Septimius Severus, situated in a park, covered a space of one hundred thousand square feet, and comprised rooms of all kinds:  gymnasia, academic halls where poets read their verses aloud, arenas for gladiators, and even theatres.  Let us not forget that the Bull and the Farnese Hercules, now so greatly admired at Naples, and the masterpieces of the Vatican, the Torso at the Belvidere, and the Laocoon were found at the baths.

These immense palatial structures were accessible to everybody.  The price of admission was a quadrans, and the quadrans was the fourth part of an as; the latter, in Cicero’s time, was worth about one cent and two mills.  Even this charge was afterward abolished.  At daybreak, the sound of a bell announced the opening of the baths.  The rich went there particularly between the middle of the day and sunset; the dissipated went after supper, in defiance of the prescribed rules of health.  I learn from Juvenal, however, that they sometimes died of it.  Nevertheless, Nero remained at table from noon until midnight, after which he took warm baths in winter and snow baths in summer.

In the earlier times of the republic there was a difference of hours for the two sexes.  The thermae were monopolized alternately by the men and the women, who never met there.  Modesty was carried so far that the son would not bathe with his father, nor even with his father-in-law.  At a later period, men and women, children and old folks, bathed pell-mell together at the public baths, until the Emperor Hadrian, recognizing the abuse, suppressed it.

Pompeii, or at least that portion of Pompeii which has been exhumed, had two public bathing establishments.  The most important of these, namely, the Stabian baths, was very spacious, and contained all sorts of apartments, side rooms, round and square basins, small ovens, galleries, porticoes, etc., without counting a space for bodily exercises (palaestra) where the young Pompeians went through their gymnastics.  This, it will be seen, was a complete water-cure establishment.

The most curious thing dug up out of these ruins is a Berosian sun-dial marked with an Oscan inscription announcing that N. Atinius, son of Marius the quaestor, had caused it to be executed, by order of the decurions, with the funds resulting from the public fines.  Sun-dials were no rarity at Pompeii.  They existed there in every shape and of every price; among them was one elevated upon an Ionic column of cipollino marble.  These primitive time-pieces were frequently offered by the Roman magistrates for the adornment of the monuments, a fact that greatly displeased a certain parasite whom Plautus describes: